This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Donald Rubin, the John Loeb Professor of Statistics at Harvard. Professor Rubin has published widely on numerous topics in statistics, and is perhaps best known for his work on missing data and causal inference. His articles have appeared in over thirty journals, and he is the author or co-author of several books on missing data, causal inference, and Bayesian data analysis, many of which are the standards in their fields. In 1995, Professor Rubin received the Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award from the American Statistical...

Let me follow up on yesterday’s post by Jim Greiner.

Jim’s problem: He’s touring the country touting tools for increased honesty in applied statistical research, only to be asked, effectively, for recommendations about using these tools to cheat more effectively. Yay academic job market.

Jim’s example goes like this: An analyst is asked to model the effect of a treatment, T, on the outcome, Y, while controlling for a bunch of confounders, X. To minimize the potential for data dredging we give the analyst only the treatment and the observed potential confounders to model the...

This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Dan Hopkins, a Ph.D. candidate at in the Government Department at Harvard. Dan has a long-standing association with Harvard, having graduated from the College in 2000. His research focuses on political behavior, state and local politics, and political methodology. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review. He will present a talk entitled "Flooded Communities: Estimating the Post-Katrina Migration's Impact on Attitudes towards the Poor and...

The Initiative in Innovative Computing, an interdisciplinary program that aims to "foster the creative use of computational resources to address issues at the forefront of data-intensive science," is hosting a talk by Edward Tufte next week. It is easy to forget that Tufte began his career as a political scientist, long before he became known for his work on the visual representation of evidence. His 1975 article on "Determinants of the Outcomes of Midterm Elections" is one of the 20 most-cited articles...